Few writers could get away with a novel in which the bulk of the story—a fictionalized version of America's postwar art scene, distilled through the memory of a seventy-eight-year-old woman—is reported rather than dramatized, but Updike pulls it off beautifully. The action, such as it is, consists of a day-long interview in Vermont of Hope Chafetz, a painter twice married to famous artists (the first of whom distinctly resembles Jackson Pollock) and finally to a man "in money." The interviewer, a young woman from New York, checks occasionally to be sure her tape recorder is running, pages through her notes, and uses the bathroom. Hope makes sandwiches. They tour the yard and look into Hope's studio. From such banalities Updike, with his immense talent for making details tell, milks a rich life for Hope and a nuanced, unwaveringly realistic relationship between the two women. Mostly, however, this is a novel of ideas. Hope muses about her distant, Protestant God and ruminates about the role of the wife of a genius. (Although the latter bits are gracefully written, their focus on events and feelings long past renders them somewhat bloodless.) Surprisingly, most immediate and convincing are the discussions about abstract expressionism (which I would think would be most difficult to translate into precise and compelling sentences): the effect of particular paintings and styles, the purpose behind specific techniques, the artists' ambitions, and Hope's provocative theories about women's and men's artistic capabilities. —Christina Schwarz

The Adventures of Pinocchio, which Carlo Collodi first published, in serialized form, in 1881, has spawned hundreds of translations—many of them in appropriately wooden prose—and countless versions for the theater and the screen. In America, at least, most of these have long since been eclipsed by Walt Disney's song-and-dance extravaganza. And indeed, with its hummable score and ominous underpinnings, that 1940 production does stand head and shoulders above much of the Disney canon, in comparison with which it resembles Crime and Punishment. Still, what about the original? Steerforth has now published an excellent new translation of Collodi's text by Nancy Canepa, and readers who know only the Disney version will find that although the moral of the story is the same, the atmosphere is darker and more dangerous. This is no sermon but a bad, sad, tantalizing dream, albeit one with a happy ending.

Some of the differences are merely cosmetic. In the Disney film, for example, Geppetto's cottage is so crammed with toys, clocks, and figurines that it looks like an outpost of FAO Schwarz. Here the old wood-carver lives in a rural hovel, with "a battered chair, a dilapidated bed, and a broken-down little table." More to the point, the puppet himself is something of a sociopath. Encountering the Talking Cricket for the first time, he responds rudely to his little companion's philosophizing: "Shut up, you nasty, bad-luck Cricket!" Then he seizes a wooden hammer from his father's workbench and squashes his interlocutor like, well, a bug. Nor does the mayhem end there. As the translator points out in her introduction, the original serialization concluded with Pinocchio's being hanged from an oak tree. Only a storm of protest from Collodi's readers, most of them still in short pants, prompted the author to write the second, more uplifting half of his tale.

All of this may suggest a collision of Mother Goose with Quentin Tarantino. But the text boasts a good many other, nonviolent charms. Like the very best fabulists, Collodi is slightly skeptical about human goodness even as he's promoting it, which explains his satirical take on the marionette theater: "The very attentive audience was nearly dying of laughter as it listened to the squabbling between the two puppets, who were gesticulating and insulting each other in every way possible and so realistically that they might have been two rational creatures, two people of this world." And from time to time his high-stepping narrative is marked by moments of real poetry. (When the seemingly dead puppet bursts into tears, the melancholic Owl can only declare, "In my opinion, when the dead cry, it is a sign that they are sorry to be dying.") Luckily there's no need to choose between Disney's version of the tale and Collodi's: we can have both. But if such a choice were necessary, I suppose I'd opt for the original—by, as it were, a nose. —James Marcus

Immense, saucer-flat, and saturated with heat, the Texas Panhandle takes some getting used to, and the same might be said of Annie Proulx's paean to this obdurate corner of the country. We're first introduced to the territory by Bob Dollar, himself a newcomer from Denver. A classic naif, determined to compensate for his parents' abandoning him to a slightly cracked but loving uncle, Bob has taken the unlikely job of persuading cattle ranchers to sell their worn-out land to Global Pork Rind for conversion into hog farms. Never mind that the ranchers are tough old coots with no desire to sell—or that hog farms stink to high heaven, truly outraging anyone who happens to live nearby. Bob rents a bunkhouse in backwater Woolybucket from the garrulous LaVon Fronk and launches a campaign to ingratiate himself with the locals. Instead they captivate him. As Bob bumbles along, we encounter a host of one-of-a-kind characters, past and present, including one Francis Scott Keister, whose roiling contempt for hog farms doesn't keep him from having an affair with a Global agent that ends bloodily, propelling the denouement. Through these interlocked histories we get an awful lot of detail about windmills, barbed wire, fences, oil, the consequences of being passed up by the railroad, and how much smarter bison are than cows. What we don't get, until well into the book, is a sense of forward movement. Too much of the text feels like only partly digested research, without much happening despite the pileup of stories, and the reader feels the urge to reach out and shake the slightly unreal Bob. But Proulx's luscious, somewhat wacky way with words remains intact (who else would talk about "bronze Polaroid light" or "a weasel-headed horse"?), and by the final pages she has worked her old magic. The novel's slow, eventual unwinding seems to go with the territory, and if Bob's comeuppance arises as no surprise, it is gratifying to see how touched he is by the locals' belief that progress can be stayed. He's even thinking of joining in their efforts. And that, for the often bleak Proulx, is a shiningly upbeat ending. —Barbara Hoffert

Joseph Roth, orphaned subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, died at the age of forty-four in Paris in 1939. He left behind one great novel, The Radetzky March; some considerable ones; and hundreds of short works, most of them newspaper articles. Over the past couple of decades the translation of Roth's works into English has been gathering momentum, notably through the endeavors of Michael Hofmann. The present work is a collection of feuilletons, short and in this case melancholic sketches, most from the 1920s, a few from the 1930s. They were brought together in 1996 by Michael Bienert and published in German as a walker's guide to Roth's Berlin. As such, the pieces must appeal less to the day-tripper and more to some Sebaldian connoisseur of loss—not only because the Berlin Roth depicted has vanished but because even as he described its qualities and people, his true subject was the emptiness, ephemerality, and unreason of Weimar Germany, which to Roth, Berlin epitomized: the city was "an aimlessly sprawling stone emblem for the sorry aimlessness of our national existence."

As these thirty-four pieces show, the writer's sympathies are with the down-at-heel, the misfits and outsiders and exotic relicts of a past way of life. He visits the demimonde of burglars, light-bulb thieves, pimps, and prostitutes. He wanders through the Jewish quarter, "a strange and mournful ghetto world" whose denizens are refugees from the East, and where he finds Solomon's Temple rebuilt, "in miniature of course," the labor of nine years. He extols the unassuming vocation of park wardens, and considers the predicament of a man released from prison after fifty-one years because "the authorities were in a good mood."

Throughout, Roth, self-styled poet and philosopher, confronts the sights around him as phenomena whose implications, usually dispiriting if not downright macabre, are never apparent but must be winkled out. In one disquieting piece he visits a steam bath, open all night in 1920. Here is revealed a netherworld of the homeless who, to gain shelter within its walls, must strip and perform a travesty of the routines of its daytime patrons. Indeed, Roth's best observations are built on such bleakly ironic conceits. Thus in 1923 he includes the unidentified dead in the number of "displaced persons" who, in the war's aftermath, haunt the streets of Berlin. Their photographs make up a gallery at police headquarters: nameless, reproachful of the living, they are the city's "obscure children," a reminder that "life isn't as serenely beautiful as the Pathé News would have you believe."

Roth is staggered by the city's sheer miscellaneousness. "Never," he wrote, "was so much order thrown at disorder, so much lavishness at parsimony, so much method at madness." He is horrified, yes, but fascinated, too, by Berlin's noise and visual chaos: "a noisy, parping, surging color, red and yellow and violet yells ... a network of wires overhead, a slashed and cross-hatched sky, as though some engineer had scrawled his deranged circuits across the ether."

Though a sense of foreboding is detectable in these pieces, the emphasis—until the very last one, written in 1933 in Paris—is less on what the future may bring than on its representing an increasing rift with the past, for which Roth feels a despairing nostalgia. "Regret for the passing of the old forms," he writes, "is like the grief of some antediluvian creature for the disappearance of a prehistoric state of being." That desolation is especially palpable in his tribute to the assassinated Walther Rathenau. To us, the murder of the Jewish statesman by right-wing extremists was perhaps the first, irreversible step toward the triumph of Nazism; to Roth, it was the destruction of a man who personified conciliation, the sort of melding of diverse elements that the Austro-Hungarian Empire represented to the writer—fancifully or otherwise. —Katherine A. Powers

We're forty years this side of The Feminine Mystique, but at this point it has become impossible to figure out which group of American females is in the biggest funk. The binging/purging, self-mutilating early adolescents of Reviving Ophelia? The harried and exhausted working mothers of a thousand earnest tomes on "work/life balance"? Or—as one might conclude after reading Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's new book—the hotshot young career women who can't manage to coax eligible men into the honeymoon suite?

The book gets off to an unpromising start: Whitehead's research centers on her interviews with a group of sixty women, most of whom are white, many of whom attended elite prep schools, half of whom attended highly selective colleges (and the rest "good private colleges and public universities"), a few of whom hold graduate degrees, all of whom are pursuing glamorous careers. As we first meet these hothouse flowers, whining about their romantic blunders "over plates of mushroom ragout in a trendy Washington restaurant," trotting along the most fashionable streets of various American cities in "a brilliant alliance: an aspiring Alpha female hooked up with an Alpha city," it's all we can do not to side with the canny men who managed to steer clear of them. But once Whitehead moves beyond these particular women and discusses the roots of their shared problem, which, she believes, lie in the radical changes in the way girls in this country are reared and educated, the book becomes interesting and even moving. She describes a national "Girl Project" that began to take hold in America in the early seventies. I missed being part of this movement by only a few years, yet the differences between my girlhood and that of the generations that followed are stark. The modern girl has played competitive team sports since her earliest childhood; has attended schools that are highly concerned with girls' academic success, particularly in math and science; has attended college in a time when female students outnumber males; has emerged into a job market in which the traditional male jobs are increasingly held by women.

Whitehead, a social conservative who wrote the controversial book The Divorce Culture, is hugely admiring of these changes, yet she indicates precisely how they have served to disadvantage young career women in the marriage market. Such women no longer find husbands in college, where the pool of available, like-minded men is large, but rather start looking for a permanent mate about ten years after graduation, when there is no formal "courtship system" in place, no pump room or fraternity formal or Dolly Levi to nudge an appropriate match along. Further, at this point they have joined a pool of prospective brides that includes younger women, women less dedicated to their own careers and therefore often more attractive to "career primary" men, and divorced women of all ages. Whitehead accurately points out that many of the sexual liberties that modern women have insisted on in the name of parity are in fact "nicely adapted to men's sexual and romantic self-interests."

Unfortunately, the book sputters out in an inanely optimistic conclusion. Whitehead's remedy for this complicated stew of social change and romantic disappointment? Internet dating! Also for-profit introduction services, better time management, and pre-engagement rings from Shreve, Crump & Low. What Whitehead fails to concede (perhaps because she is the mother of two unmarried daughters in their thirties) is that the situation does not lend itself to such easy fixes. She describes one interviewee who is not "looking for someone to take care of her," another who is consistently "driven by the best projects" at work, a third who insists she will only marry a man who will share equally in child-rearing. We are reminded that "today, the woman is free to make the first phone call, to suggest a first date, and to propose sex." These are perhaps laudable advances, but that such women would imagine that they would also elicit a formal, old-fashioned proposal seems naive. The national Boy Project may have taught America's young men to treat women with new respect in the classroom and the boardroom, and it has certainly prepared them for an unprecedented amount of no-strings nooky; what it has not impelled them to do is to make a bride of every hard-charging woman who suddenly—and fleetingly—wants to play fifties girl with a diamond solitaire and a box full of Tiffany invitations. —Caitlin Flanagan

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.